Friday, March 30, 2012

For a while now, I've felt like I've plateaued in strength, but this week has seen a couple of unexpected breakthroughs. On Wednesday, I nabbed a new Zercher squat PR, and today, I eked out a push-press PR when I managed to lock out with the equivalent of my bodyweight hoisted above my head.

It's not like this came out of nowhere -- we have, after all, been working on these movements for the past month at CrossFit Palo Alto. Nonetheless, I was caught a bit off guard because my sleep has been HORRIBLE. Between work, kids, travel, battling colds, and frantically piecing together the content for the Nom Nom Paleo app, neither M nor I have enjoyed much shut-eye these days. It's ironic that we're constantly telling people they need to prioritize sleep, but we never sleep ourselves.

Sadly, April looks to be even crazier -- but I plan on spending the entire month of May in bed, unconscious.

Metcon:

"11,250"

Based on the CrossFit Love deadlift challenge from 2010, this workout involves deadlifting 11,250 pounds for time. It doesn't really matter how you hit the magic number. You can do 50 reps at 225, or 61 reps at 185. Heck, you could probably even do 250 reps at 45 pounds, though that would be an entirely different sort of workout.

As you may recall, I'm now a little leery of high-rep, heavy deadlift metcons, so I decided to go with 185 pounds rather than the heavier weight. I'm glad I did; the barbell was plenty heavy once I sped through the first two dozen reps. Once I racked up 30 reps, I hit a wall, and had to pause after every two or three reps.

Result: 6:14 as RXed. Not exactly speedy. Tim pointed out that Austin Malleolo did this workout in less than one minute, which didn't exactly make me feel better about my performance:

(Austin is insanely strong, but I have to say that after watching his deadlift form, my back wants to weep.)